Ex-Ministerof Agriculture Yermolov’s new book about the
“present epidemic of incendiarism in Russia” has given rise to
controversy in the newspapers. The liberal press has pointed out that fires
in the countryside have not decreased but rather increased after the
revolution. The reactionary newspapers have taken up Yermolov’s outcry and
lamentation about “the impunity of the incendiaries”, “terrorism in the
countryside”, and so on. There has been an extraordinary increase in the
number of fires in rural localities. For in stance, between 1904 and 1907
the figure went up twofold in Tambov Gubernia, two and a half
times in Orel Gubernia, and threefold in Voronezh
Gubernia. “The more or less well-to-do peasants,” writes Novoye
Vremya, which acts as a lackey of the government, “want to set up
farmsteads and are trying to introduce new farming methods, but are
besieged, as if by guerrillas in enemy territory, by a lawless rural
element that has run wild. They are being burned out and hounded, hounded
and burned out until there is nothing left for them to do but ‘abandon
everything and flee’.”

Anunpleasant admission indeed for those supporting the tsarist
government! For us Social-Democrats the latest in formation is not lacking
in interest as further confirmation of the lies of the government and the
pitiful impotence of liberal policy.

TheRevolution of 1905 fully showed that the old order in the Russian
countryside is irrevocably doomed by history. Nothing in the world can
bolster up this order. How is it to be changed? The peasant masses gave the
answer by their uprisings in 1905 and through their deputies in the First
and Second Dumas. The landed estates must be taken away from the landlords
without compensation. When 30,000 land lords (headed by Nicholas Romanov)
own 70 million dessiatines of land and ten million peasant
households almost the
same amount, the result can be nothing except bondage, abject poverty, ruin and
stagnation of the whole national economy. Hence the Social-Democratic Labour
Party called on the peasants to take up the revolutionary struggle. By their
mass strikes in 1905 the workers throughout Russia rallied the peasants and
directed their struggle. The liberal plan to “reconcile” the peasants with the
landlords through “redemption payments at a fair
valuation”{1} was an empty, miserable, treacherous trick.

Howdoes the Stolypin government want to refashion the old order in the
countryside? It wants to speed up the complete ruin of the peasants, to preserve
the landed estates, to help an insignificant handful of rich peasants to set up
farmsteads and grab as much as possible of the land of the village communes. The
government has realised that the peasant masses are against it and it is trying
to find allies among the rich peasants.

Stolypinhimself once said that “twenty years of tranquillity” would be needed
to carry out the “reform” proposed by the government. By “tranquillity” he
means submissiveness on the part of the peasants, the absence of any struggle
against violence. Yet without violence committed by the rural superintendents
and other authorities, violence at every step, violence against tens of
millions—without sup pressing the slightest signs of independence on the
part of these millions, the Stolypin “reform” cannot be carried out. Not even
for three years, let alone twenty, has Stolypin been able to bring about
“tranquillity”, nor will he be able to do so; this is the unpleasant truth of
which the tsar’s lackeys have been reminded by the ex-minister’s book about
fires in the countryside.

Thepeasants do not and cannot have any other way out of the position of
desperate want, poverty, and death by starvation into which the government has
plunged them than by mass struggle together with the proletariat to overthrow
the tsarist regime. Preparation of the forces of the proletariat for this
struggle, the creation, development and consolidation of proletarian
organisations—this is the immediate task of the R.S.D.L.P.

Notes

{1}
This refers to the plan put forward by the Constitutional-Democratic
Party (Cadets) in 1906 for transferring to the peasants part of the
landlords’ land for which compensation was to be paid to the landlords. The
“fair valuation” of which the Cadets spoke meant that the peasants would
have to pay for the land much more than it was actually worth.